Scripture referenced 3 passages
The passage this message was preached from, in full, with every other passage it reached for.
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Isaiah 40:3 quoted as the theme verse for Old Faithful Christian Ranch's summer camp, about preparing the way of the Lord
3 The voice of one who calls out, “Prepare the way of Yahweh in the wilderness! Make a level highway in the desert for our God.
World English Bible · Read it in another translation
Keep this verse
1 Peter 3:7
cited as the verse whose marginal note in Matthew's Bible became known as the wife beater's Bible, about treating a wife as the weaker vessel so prayers are not hindered
7 You husbands, in the same way, live with your wives according to knowledge, giving honor to the woman, as to the weaker vessel, as being also joint heirs of the grace of life; that your prayers may not be hindered.
World English Bible · Read it in another translation
Isaiah 55:10-11
quoted at the close of the sermon about God's word not returning void but accomplishing His purpose, likened to rain and snow watering the earth
10 For as the rain comes down and the snow from the sky, and doesn’t return there, but waters the earth, and makes it grow and bud, and gives seed to the sower and bread to the eater;
11 so is my word that goes out of my mouth: it will not return to me void, but it will accomplish that which I please, and it will prosper in the thing I sent it to do.
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Recap
The message in order, in a few minutes of reading.
This was not a typical Sunday morning sermon working through a Bible passage. Pastor Ray walked the congregation through a sweeping chronological history of how the English Bible came to exist, tracing the long, often costly effort to put God's word into the hands of ordinary people, and closing with Isaiah's reminder that God's word will accomplish exactly what He intends.
What was said
Pastor Ray opened by framing the morning as a departure from his twelve-year walk through the New Testament in chronological order, which he had just finished two weeks prior. With that series complete, he wanted to look at what happened after the New Testament was entrusted to the church, and specifically how it traveled through centuries of history to arrive in English-speaking hands. He described his approach as a "whirlwind black and white chronological analysis of primary source documents," and offered one orienting idea borrowed from someone else: history is the plumb line of theology. God's word stays steady and true, but human handling of it is something we are accountable for.
The first major figure was Jerome, the fourth-century linguist who translated the Greek and Hebrew scriptures into Latin, completing the Latin Vulgate in 405 AD. Pastor Ray noted that Jerome's motivation was genuine humility before God and the text, including a conviction after a dream in which he felt Jesus say to him that he was more a follower of Cicero than of Christ. The Vulgate became the official Bible of the church and remained so for a very long time.
The history then moved into the medieval period, where two regional councils, Toulouse in 1229 and Tarragona in 1234, responded to heresy by restricting Bible translation into the vernacular. By this point very few people still understood Latin, and the fear was that putting scripture into local languages would allow heretics to distort it. The Council of Tarragona went so far as to prescribe death and burning for anyone caught with a Bible in their own language. Pastor Ray acknowledged the councils were trying to hold back error, and drew a comparison to his own desire to restrain the prosperity gospel, while making clear he would never do so by taking scripture out of people's hands.
John Wycliffe entered the story in 1382, an English priest with a deep conviction that people deserved access to the Bible. He translated the entire text from the Latin Vulgate into Middle English, and before he died on New Year's Eve 1384, asked his assistant Purvey to keep refining it as greater scholarship would allow. Pastor Ray read aloud a 1395 church document still seething at Wycliffe a decade after his death, which accused him of giving "the pearl of the gospel" to the laity, to "swine." He set that anger against the plain fact that Jesus delivered his teaching in the language ordinary people understood, quoting from the Septuagint rather than always from the Hebrew, because the point was for people to hear and receive it.
The Gutenberg printing press in 1455 changed the scope of what was possible, and Erasmus's 1516 Greek New Testament gave translators a reliable single-step path from the original language. William Tyndale built on that foundation, producing an English New Testament from the Greek rather than from the Latin, and was eventually strangled and burned at the stake in Antwerp for doing so. His last words were a prayer that God would open the eyes of the king of England. Pastor Ray noted that 83 percent of the King James Bible is exactly what Tyndale wrote.
The story moved through the Great Bible of 1539, the Geneva Bible of 1560, the flawed Bishop's Bible of 1568, and the Catholic Rheims New Testament of 1582, before arriving at the Hampton Court Conference of 1604 where King James brought scholars from across the spectrum together with a clear directive: fidelity to the Greek, Aramaic, and Hebrew text, no partisan agenda, and consensus over partisanship. Six companies of scholars, nine men each, worked independently and then checked one another's work repeatedly before passing sections to the next company. The King James Bible was released in 1611 and remained the standard for more than three hundred and fifty years.
Pastor Ray closed by moving quickly through the modern translation landscape, from the 1885 English Revised Version through the New American Standard, the New International Version, the New Living Translation, the English Standard Version, and others, noting the different philosophies at work and affirming that nearly all of them can be trusted. His closing point, drawn from Isaiah, was that God is able to protect his word, and has. The question is whether we will humble ourselves before the text and let it bend us, or whether we will bend it to suit ourselves.
Doing a Bible study?
Here is a guide we have prepared for you: the passages in order, questions for the group, and room to write.
- Pastor Ray described Jerome, Wycliffe, Tyndale, and others as people who were humble before God's word, wanting to bend to it rather than bend it to themselves. What does that kind of humility actually look like in your own daily reading of scripture?
- The 1395 church document accused Wycliffe of giving the gospel to 'swine' by putting it in the hands of ordinary people. Pastor Ray pointed out that Jesus himself taught fishermen, tax collectors, and carpenters, not the clergy. How does that tension between institutional authority and personal access to scripture show up in your own experience of faith?
and 3 more questions in the guide
Read the full transcript 12,465 words
Good morning, everybody. How are you? If y'all want to, would you stand with me? We'll sing them in from the vestibule. Pastor went a little long in the first service, but we will see if we can get this one underway.
So he keeps me singing. Hymn number 746. Hymnals are up front if you want one, but the words will come up on the wall there.
There's within my heart a mellow deep. Jesus whispers sweet and low. Fear not, I am with thee. Peace be still. In all of life's ebb and flow.
Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, sweetest name I know, fills my every longing, keeps me singing as I go. All my life was wrecked by sin and strife. Discord filled my heart with pain. Jesus swept across the broken strings, stirred the slumbering courts again. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, sweet est name I know, fills my every longing, keeps me singing as I go, feasting on the riches of his grave, resting beneath his sheltering wing, always looking on his smiling face.
That is why I shout and sing. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, sweetest name I know, fills my every longing, keeps me singing as I go. Though sometimes he leads through waters deep, trials fall across my way. Though sometimes the path seems rough and steep, see his footprints all the way. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, sweetest name I know, fills my every longing, keeps me singing as I go on the last.
Soon he's coming back to welcome me far beyond the starry sky. I shall wing my flight to worlds unknown. I shall reign with him on high. Let's join his chorus again. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, sweetest name I know, fills my every care and every longing of my heart, keeps me singing as I go.
Amen.
That's that's an old one. That's a fun one too. It is well with my soul. Hymn number seven zero five. Amen.
When peace like a river attended my way. When sorrows like sea, billows roll. What ever my lot thou hast taught me to say. It is well. It is well.
It is well with my soul. My sin.
Oh, the bliss of this glorious thought.
I sin not in part, but the whole is nailed to the cross, and I bear it no more. Praise the Lord. Praise the Lord, oh my soul. It is well. With my soul.
It
is well it is well with my soul. And Lord, haste the day when my faith shall be sighed. The clouds be rolled back as a scroll. The trump shall resound and the Lord shall descend even so it is well with my soul. It is well with my soul.
Is well. It is well with my soul. Amen. Y'all can have a seat.
Isn't it great to have peace that passes understanding? It is well with myself. A few announcements this morning. It is the last installment, the super exciting happy happy good times budgeting workshop. Last official installment, we had planned it for three weeks.
Nick Stern, Richard Yule, Jeremy Leiper have been doing this for the last two weeks, Tuesday night, six to eight right here at First Bee. If you want to schedule a time with Nick, he'd be glad to take it after the fact, But that's coming up. Super excited. Happy happy good times, budgeting workshop to get a handle on finances. Awana clubs.
Couple of things. Tomorrow night at Awana is the night for finishing up the Pinewood Derby cars. So there'll be some saws out here, and there'll be paints and whatnot trying to finish that up. And it'll be a regular club night, no dressing up, even though that is crazy hair night, I'm pretty sure. That's crazy hair night, Steven, Brian up there.
But, volunteer recognition party will be next week, May 5, just after the second service, 12:30. Food will be provided. Felix and Guadalupe are gonna make a big Mexican meal. So, if you have been a volunteer for Awana, bring the whole family, plan on eating lunch down the fellowship hall after the second service. We still do need, always need volunteers for connect hour, that's the way it runs, is volunteers.
Thank you all for doing this. I see several faces that you all do this pretty often. So contact Addy if you have any questions. 690-3892 is her number. There is a study at lunchtime.
Don't let that imply that there will be lunch. This is a men's study, no lunch. You can bring your lunch if you want to, brown bag special, but men's lunch study is on Thursdays. We try to start about 11:55 in the Fellowship Hall. It goes from twelve to one, and it'll be over at 01:00.
We pray for each other but also study scripture together. We're in 1st Peter, first Peter 2. It's where we'll pick up this week. Vacation Bible school this year is gonna be the June 24 to the twenty seventh. That's pre k through sixth grade.
You can sign up online or you can sign up out in the vestibule. There should be a sign up sheet there too for any kids or volunteers that wanna help out. Hometown Nazareth where Jesus was a kid is the theme, and there's a decorating meeting that already happened, so you missed that one if you weren't there, just so you know. Alright. There is a potluck coming up for Jean, May 17, 05:30.
No gifts please, but we do wanna celebrate Jean and Ann, not really celebrate her departure, we'll lament your departure, but we'll celebrate your time with us and the good friends will gather around. Friday, May 17, 05:30 in the Fellowship Hall. I was joking about lamenting. I think it's a good move. Alright.
It's a good move. Alright. Congregational meeting also is happening next week between services. It's a chance to vote on our constitution changes. There are not any major changes.
Some of it is formatting, some of it is wording, but there are changes. If you wanna know them, there are copies available in the church office if you wanna read them before you come in next week. But members present and voting is who gets to make the decisions on this. So that's it. May 5 between services, that's next week.
Ah, church cleanup. It's almost springtime. Isn't the snow melted out there yet? It's almost time. So, the church cleanup day is going be May 18, nine to one we think, and many hands make for light work.
So, if you would, show up. Tim Dalton has a list of all of the tasks that we're hoping to accomplish and it'd be great. There'll be pizza provided and volunteers from all skill levels, obviously, are required. So if you would join us on May 18, that'll be fun. And I think that's the last of the announcements.
Did I finish? Did I miss anything? Brenda. Okay. Do you want to do that?
I don't have to change clothes in this one. We had a baptism this morning. Why don't you come on up? I thank everybody that's coming is here. So this is Old Faithful Christian Ranches up in Island Park, Idaho.
And when I was here as an intern fourteen or fifteen years ago, I preached I think eight or nine times throughout the course of the summer. And then the last week, the very last week that we were gonna be here, I got a call from Brenda actually and she said, hey, one of the people that goes to the church said that you'd be great to come up next week and do our middle school camp. So, it's like a 140 something middle schoolers and I had preached eight messages in my life basically and she said, you have from Friday noon until Monday noon, you have eight messages that you need to present and it was on the role of the Holy Spirit in the life of the believer. I still remember I cried between because I'm not a preacher, but here I'm available. And actually, some of y'all and she all wrote to the pastor search committee and it it was a meaningful week in my life.
I know it's a meaningful week. Actually, there's a person who watches online every week, every week, and she contacted me just this past week and said, I'm thankful that you were there that week. So anyway, I can't say enough good things about Old Faithful Christian Ranch.
Thank you. I am so thankful to be here with you guys. It's actually my first time visiting on a Sunday morning. Even though I live in Driggs, I had just never made it over here on a Sunday. So thank you for having me.
I am the program director at Old Faithful Christian Ranch. The Lord started the ministry twenty eight years ago, and we're up in Island Park, about thirty minutes south of Yellowstone National Park, and 40 acres that God has used over the years to minister to kids primarily in the month of July. We have Last year, we had 367 kids who came in the month of July. It starts at fourth grade, so if you know of any kids that are in third grade right now, going into fourth grade, then they would be old enough for camp, and then it goes all the way up to graduated seniors. And so we minister to kids in the month of July, and then the rest of the year we have churches that come up and use the facilities.
The men's group was up this winter, and so we just love Jesus, and we wanna share Jesus with campers, and we wanna share Jesus with the people who come up to the camp. And so, as I'm talking about the camp, I just want you guys to keep in mind that this is God's ministry, and we do whatever he us to do, and sometimes that means cooking for a group and hosting them, and then other times it means dressing up like a chicken and running games with the kids, and that's more my job. I get to do the fun stuff, and so we have camp coming up, and that's the first thing I wanna talk about, is that camp is such a Has had a huge impact in my life, and I know in so many others' lives, because it gets kids away from the distractions of life. They're not allowed to have their cell phones, and so Thank you, amen, I'm excited about it. And so And our staff don't have their phones either, and so it gets quiet, and the kids are engaging with one another.
They're in a cabin with about 11 other kids their own age, and for a lot of these kids, they feel very isolated, alone, like there there's nobody else who loves Jesus. And then they're they go to camp and there's a 100 other kids, many of whom love Jesus. Now, I'm not alone. And it's a beautiful thing to see them making friends that last a lifetime. I I am still friends with a lot of people that I went to camp with over the years, many of them I ministered to with at camp, and so it's a great place.
We want to share the love of Jesus with these kids, and so we do chapel twice a day, so that's The kids come Monday, they leave Friday, that means eight times we're getting into the word together. They also do devotions as a cabin in the morning and in the evening. We have an evening campfire where our staff share their testimonies, and then throughout the week and throughout the day, we're just talking with these kids, loving on them, and honestly just giving them an ear to listen, because these kids are going through really hard times in their lives, and they need somebody who loves Jesus that can come around and just give them a hug or an encouraging word. And so we're gonna do all sorts of fun stuff with the kids. You know, we do archery and tubing and canoeing and zipline and all sorts of fun stuff.
The kids' favorite game is a game called SNOT, which is it involves face paint and a giant stuffed octopus, and they just love it. It's kind of a version of capture the flag. And so we're gonna have a ton of fun with these kids. We're gonna love on them. And so if you know of any kids that would like to come to camp, I'll be in the back, and these are the brochures that you're gonna wanna grab.
It has all the information. We are one of the most affordable camps in this entire region. It's only $200 for the week, and that includes everything. And there are scholarships available. If you know kids who need to come who can't afford it, we will never turn a kid away because of finances.
And so please, please, please, if you know kids who wanna come, grab these, and if you have questions, all of the information should be in here. So that's for summer camp, and if you're thinking, I would love to be involved, you'd like to come up and serve, then you would wanna grab one of these green ones, and that's for being on staff. In the month of July, we have over 80 staff members who come up. Most of them volunteer to love on these kids, and so we have all sorts of skill levels, and what I tell people is if you wanna come serve at camp, we'll find a place for you. And so we have people who come up and do maintenance, they do kitchen, they are cabin leaders, some are nurses.
We also have a position I like to refer to as a floater, and that's just somebody who goes around and just takes care of things that they see that needs done. It's hospitality, really. And so if you wanna come serve at camp, please talk to me, and we will work on getting you up there. And so we need people who can come up and serve and love on these kids. And if you're thinking, I don't wanna be up there.
The mosquitoes or being around kids or whatever, but you wanna love on the ministry, you can donate. There's a couple of different ways you can donate to the scholarship fund. We had a 107 kids last year that needed financial help out of our 367 kids. So it's a huge need. So if you wanna donate to that, or you can donate to the general fund, which just goes to the general expenses of the ministry.
Myself and the kitchen director are both missionaries at the camp, so you could support either of us also. And so there's different ways for you to get involved. And so I wanted to share one other thing before I finish up, is last year we had 367 kids that came. 25 of them gave their lives to Christ for the very first time. Absolutely.
We are so excited when kids When they recognize their need for Jesus, and out of that So we had twenty five first time commitments, and the kids do an evaluation at the end of the week, and they let us know their decisions. We had 233 kids who rededicated their lives last summer. That's two thirds of all the kids who came in the month of July who said, I want to follow Jesus wholeheartedly. And so, this year, our theme is clear the king's highway. That's our slogan, is how can we help these kids remove obstacles in their lives to following Jesus?
And so, our theme verse is Isaiah 40 verse three, which says, a voice cries, in the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God, and so we're looking to the return of Christ. We're coming alongside these campers and saying, how can we help you in your walk? How can we help you walk better for Christ? And so, that's what we're focusing on, and so if you want to be praying for us as a ministry, if you are thinking about coming up on staff, would encourage you guys to grab a tiny little flamingo. You'll see there on the back table, I'm obsessed with flamingos, and that's a long story I won't share here.
But the kids know that we use flamingos for everything, but you could stick this in your pocket, put it on your window seal, put it on the dash of your car, and just think about, when you see it, think about praying for the kids. These kids are going through really hard times. We need a lot of staff to be able to love on them, and there's just a lot of needs in the ministry, and so take a flamingo, stick it where you're gonna be praying, and if you have campers that wanna come and they are excited about camp, grab a flamingo. Just grab a flamingo, they're fantastic. And I'll be in the back, so if you guys have questions, you can ask.
But thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it. Thanks.
Thank you, Brenda. I think songs come next. Right? Okay. Would you stand?
We're gonna sing the wonder of it all. The wonder of it all. If you know it, sing out.
Is a wonder that's only begun. Oh, the wonder of it all. The wonder of it all. Just to think that God loves me. Oh, the wonder of it all.
All just to think that God loves me.
Amen. Peace Like a River, hymn number seven fifty. It's a great camp song.
I've got peace like a river, I've got peace like a river. I've got peace like a river in my soul. In my soul. Let's pick up a little. I've got love like an ocean.
I've got peace like an ocean. I've got peace like an ocean in my soul. I've got peace like an ocean. I've got peace like an ocean. I've got peace like an ocean in my soul.
If it's joy, it's joy like a fountain. Joy like a fountain. I've got joy like a fountain. I've got joy like a fountain in my soul. I've got joy like a fountain.
I've got joy like a fountain. I've got joy like a fountain in my soul.
Amen. And if we were at camp, we would speed it up about three times
that say, I've got peace, love, joy, like fountain.
You're right. But we're not at camp. Yeah. And there are motions. There's one person doing the motions I was holding back.
Y'all can have a seat. I'm gonna invite the ushers to come forward. God, I thank you that we can have peace like a river, just a deep river that runs quiet. We can have peace in you. I thank you that we have love like an ocean.
We're never gonna hit the end of your love, God. May we never limit your love to others. I pray that we would have that outlet in this time, this offering time, we wanna see, Lord, your gospel go forward. Would you use everything that's placed in these plates? Actually, everything that's placed in these plates metaphorically, that every conversation and every breath that we breathe out would be breathed out with the knowledge of God, the understanding, and the love of God.
May the spirit that is indwelling us come out of our mouths, Lord. I pray that you would use us as messengers of your peace, love, and joy. And I pray Lord that you would provide fertile soil for the gospel to take root. In Jesus name, we ask for you to use this offering time and do your will and your way, whatever that is. We pray that you direct us in that.
In Jesus name, amen. I think I'll
Every day they pass me by, I can see it in their eye. Empty people filled with care, headed who knows where. On they go through private pain, living fear to fear. Laughter hides the silent cries. Only Jesus hears.
People need the Lord. People need the Lord.
We are called to take his light to a world where wrong seems right. What could be too great a cause for sharing life with one who's lost? Through his love, our hearts can feel all the grief they bear. They must hear the words of life. Only we can share.
People need the Lord. People need the Lord.
Amen. Thank you. It's been a while. That one came out in like 1983. I remember it in my childhood very very clearly.
I didn't remember all the notes. I remember the words though. This is gonna be different. I've I've I've I've already apologized to the visitors. This is gonna be a little different this morning.
Typically, my scheme is I have been going through the New Testament in the chronological order of the events for twelve years, but I finished that two weeks ago. So this week, I wanna look going forward from the time of the New Testament, it was entrusted to us. The New Testament was entrusted to us, the Old Testament was entrusted to us, and this is a whirlwind black and white chronological analysis of primary source documents pertaining to the history of the holy Bible in English. Okay? Are you with me so far?
Alright. So it's in English. If there's anybody here who speaks a different language as their native tongue, it's not really gonna be your history, but I will say this, most of the histories of the translated word of God into native tongues follow a similar path. History, I heard somebody say one time and I think it's pretty good. History is the plumb line of theology.
God's word will go This like this. His word is steady and true, but our understanding of it, he will not allow it to stay out of bounds. What we do with scripture, we are responsible for. So here's the first guy that I want to mention. So we were entrusted with the New Testament in Greek from within the first century with Jesus.
By one ten AD, we have a full list of all of the Bible books. Okay? And the old testament scriptures in Hebrew, we had those, we've had those, we have thousands and thousands and thousands, probably 100 thousands of copies. So we have the Hebrew text, we have the Greek texts that have been copied over and over and over, but with no changes. I'm talking about this guy, Eusebius Hieronymus Sofrinius, does anybody know who that is?
No? Geronimo? Do you know who that is? Not Geronimo, but Geronimo. It's Jerome.
Jerome was Italian. He was an incredible student of linguistics. Amazing student. Completely surrendered to God's will for his life. Actually, I didn't mention this the first service, but he was convicted about his own sin and he was convicted about his own heart.
He had a dream one night and he heard Jesus say to him, you are more a follower of Cicero than you are of me. And it convicted him. He did not wanna be a follower of a secular authority even as great as Cicero might be. He wanted to be an absolute follower of Jesus. So, he wanted for the Bible to affect his life.
Humbly before God in the text, he became the right hand man of Damascus, Pope Damascus in the three eighties. This is Saint Jerome. Saint Jerome, this is a sketch of Saint Jerome by one young Ray McDaniel. When we were studying in Italy in 1992, I was taken aback by Saint Jerome. He has a cross crucifix.
He's holding. He loves Christ. He's standing on top of a lion. It's got all kinds of this Hellenistic Greek type action going on. It's so beautiful.
There's actually the thing. This is in a little chapel off to the side of the Siena Duomo. It's by Bernini. There was one of Mary Magdalene as an accompanying piece. But Saint Jerome is known for going from the Greek and Hebrew text, which we had lots of lots of them.
Thousands and thousands of different copies of them at this time And he went from that and he meticulously and fervently worked by himself, mostly by himself, to produce what the church would call and still calls the Latin Vulgate. The Latin Vulgate is the vulgar tongue of the day or the most common tongue of the day. Under the Roman Empire, they spread Latin everywhere where they went. Right? And so, as a lingua franca, we call it, as the main business language, they wanted to get the Greek and Hebrew text.
Greek was some people understood it. Hebrew, very few understood because very few were Hebrews or Jews. And so there were not a lot of folks that understood Hebrew. There were not a lot of folks that were still understanding Greek very well. So it was with good intent that Jerome himself started translating from Greek and Hebrew to Latin Vulgate.
He completed it in four zero five AD. Four zero five AD. That became the official Roman Catholic church if you're looking at it that way. That became the thing. Also, by the way, I'm not gonna bash the Catholic church.
Please, don't expect me to. If you just grumble under your breath and you hold on and you get aggravated with it, I'm sorry. I won't bash it. This is the closest we've been back together. The unity Christ prayed for in five hundred years.
Please don't ruin it. Okay? The church of this time is not the church of this time. Right? Of the 04/2005.
Now, the next step we're gonna take, the Latin Vulgate was it for up until a lot later. 12/29, that's a big jump from 04/2005. What happened in between there? The dark ages, the middle ages, the in right about now, some of this was crusades, not the best idea we ever had. The council of Toulouse, the council of Toulouse was in Southern France.
It was to fight the Albigensian heresy. Albigensian heresy was a kind of a neo gnostic neo nazi, neo gnostic heresy. The gnostic heresy was one of the reasons why we had the Latin Vulgate. The gnostic heresy was that spirit was good, flesh was bad, do whatever you want to with your body because really what matters is your spirit. And when we die, we'll be wherever we're going.
But right now, do whatever you want to. Whatever feels right, do it. That was the gnostic heresy. So in 04/2005, the Latin Vulgate was partially so that more people could understand it. More people would be able to understand God's word in the language that they spoke in.
12/29, Council of Toulouse. The Albigensians are reviving this heresy. Only a few people spoke Latin at this time. So in Southern France, they're speaking old French. They're not speaking Latin.
There's some overlap there. But this Albigensian heresy is getting out of hand. And so, local council was called, what are we going to do about this heresy? And the decision came down that we should not let people translate the Bible because the Albigensians had translated it into their language, but they were doing it and it was kind of stacking the deck. And so they said, we don't want that.
We're trying to control heresy. So they quashed it. Have you heard of an Albigensian? Do you do you know any? No.
There's there's a neo gnostic move afoot right now, but there are no Albigensians. It worked. So, twelve thirty four, five years later, Council of Tarragona, this is in Spain. Has anybody ever heard of the Spanish Inquisition? This is part of that.
Okay? There were people that were what the church deemed to be heretical in what they were teaching. Part of it was they were not teaching the authority of the church. That was part of it. They were not teaching the hierarchy of the church, they're teaching more of a priesthood of the believer and this was seen as a threat to the power and so the Council of Tarragona was very similar to the Council of Toulouse and they said that anybody who was caught with copies of the Bible in their own language, distributing them, reading them, should be killed, burned at the stake, all of the materials expunged by fire.
So that was the decision of the Council of Tarragona. Again, regional. It was not from the top. It was not something that But we know from both Toulouse and Tarragona that that was the attitude. Whenever heresy strikes, we have to all be on the same page, quash it.
That was the idea. And various widely ranging various guesses for how many people died in the Spanish inquisition. From 50,000 to 50,000,000. That's a big difference. Wycliffe, John Wycliffe.
Okay. Now, I said this was gonna be in English. John Wycliffe is English speaking. He spoke old English modern old English, middle English. That's what he spoke.
And he believed as a priest, he believed that people should have access to the Bible. It was a very deeply held conviction and so he started to present Bible studies. He still did the mass in Latin, but he did present the an early version of the scriptures in 1382. So we've come 04/2005, 12/29, 1234, and 1382 in England, Wycliffe undertook to take a real shot from the Latin Vulgate. He wrote the whole Bible and I say whole in quotations because it is the Old Testament and the New Testament and the Apocrypha that was in there.
So, he took all of Jerome's work, Old Testament, New Testament and Apocrypha, all 80 books. Although, if we back up for a second, nobody considers the Apocrypha to be canonical. What Apocrypha actually means is privately hidden away to be studied at home. There are books of history that happened in the intertestamental silence. Nobody believes they're canonical.
Okay? So Old Testament, New Testament, plus the Apocrypha was in there. He translated it from the Latin Vulgate which makes sense because that's the official thing of the church. He was a priest of the church. Doctor, amazing linguist, and so he translates that and then after he died, he died on New Year's Eve of 1384.
It's almost May 1385. And he died while given a mass, a New Year's Eve mass. He was delivering the mass and had, some people say a heart attack, he had an episode, whatever, and ended up killing killing him. Actually, it happened three days before he died on New Year's Eve. Purvey was his right hand man and was helping with the revision and with his permission and even his insistence, he would revise as greater scholarship would allow.
What Wycliffe, one guy, tried to translate from the Latin Vulgate into English, into old English and then said, Pervey, this is my life's work, would you take over and continue to revise as necessary as greater scholarship would allow? And he did. So we have mostly five, six of them are the later version per these revisions, but we have some of the early ones too, about a 170 of them remain. And that is saying something because if anyone was found to be with these books, they were to be killed and the books, the the and the books were to be burned. That actually happened later but he had gotten it spread out.
Now, one of the things is this was a handwritten deal. The nature of the Bible was it was handwritten, it took somebody writing it out. Have you ever tried to write out like just Philippians? I've I've tried to remember memorize Philippians one time and I thought it'll help if I write it down. Boy, I can't imagine being a copyist that copies the whole Bible and to do it with the penmanship they did is amazing.
But the handwritten nature of it limited its sphere of influence. You can only make so many copies by hand. It takes a lot. He does, thirteen eighty four, thirteen eighty five. There's an angry quote from the official documents of the church that I thought that you would enjoy, so I'll put it up here.
This is in 1395. Now consider this is ten years after this man died. There's still Madowyn, this pestilent and wretched John Wickliffe. How dare he? That son of the old serpent endeavoring by every means to attack the very faith and the sacred doctrine of the holy church Translated from Latin into English, the gospel.
That's what they're accusing him of. Translated from Latin into English, the gospel that Christ gave to the clergy and the doctors of the church. Wait a second. Who did Christ give the gospel to? Fishermen?
Carpenters? Tax collectors? Former prostitutes? It wasn't clergy and doctors of the church. But that was the thinking at the time.
Do you see where I'm talking about the swing is this way and it's swinging back the other way now. So, he had the audacity to translate from Latin into English, the gospel. Indeed, all of the scriptures. He did the whole Bible, really, that Christ gave to the clergy and the doctors of the church. Wait a second.
Who was it that killed Jesus by the way? I mean, we did, but who was it? The clergy. The religious folk were the ones that had him crucified even though they used Caesar to do it. So so that by his means, John Wycliffe's means, the scriptures have become vulgar and more open to laymen and women who can read than is usually it is to quite learned clergy of good intelligence.
He's made it easier for people than it's ever been. And so, the pearl of the gospel, indeed, the scriptures in Toto is scattered abroad and trodden underfoot by swine. How dare he give the gospel to the pigs? Do you see a clergy and laity difference there? How dare he do this?
Make it available to the people. Now, think about this. When the finger of God wrote the 10 commandments on the stone, it was written in Hebrew, the language that the people understood. When Jesus delivered his sermons, it was in Aramaic, Greek, Aramaic or Greek usually. In the language that the people understood.
When he used quotes according to all the gospels, when he used quotes from the Old Testament, he quoted it from the Septuagint translation which was the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. I'm sure he spoke Hebrew too. But he spoke in a language that the people could understand. That's the point. And this was the crime of John Wickliffe.
So that that was ten years after his death. I still think that that's like, man, they were still angry with this guy ten years later. So fourteen o eight, this is the third synod of Oxford which they came up with the Constitutions of Oxford and Toulouse said, it's a do not translate these things into French. And Tarragona said, do not translate these things into Spanish. And the third senator of Oxford said, do not translate this into English.
We want them gone. So opposition to the people having the Bible in English led to this fourteen o eight constitution of Oxford. Still local. It wasn't from the top necessarily, but it forbade the making or the reading of any portion of the scripture in English on penalty of forfeiting life and goods. Less than 1% of the people understood Latin.
There are more people in this room right now that understand Latin, Really. And that's the way it was always presented. In spite of the prohibition though, there are more Wycliffe manuscripts than any other English medieval writing that we have more copies of Wycliffe's Bible than we do of any other one thing from the medieval times, Indicating the hunger of the people for the scriptures there wanting to protect them and this is in the face of them being burned. So this is actually a page from one of the Wycliffe translations of the Bible. That's the kind of handwriting they use right there.
So that's what was supposed to happen after the constitutions of Oxford and that the council of constants So this is even after fourteen o eight saying, what you ought to do with anything that's found in English, you burn it. The council of Constant said, that guy was so bad who died in 1384 on New Year's Eve. Let's burn up his body. So they went back and they exhumed his body, which was buried next to the church where everybody gets buried. And that's holy ground and he shouldn't be there.
So they dug him up and they burned his bones and then they dumped him in the river so he'd be spread out all over the place. Forget about that guy. It was confirmed by Martin the fifth. It was carried out in 1428. Now, I said at the beginning, I'm not bashing Catholics.
This is a matter of history, no doubt about it. That's what they thought ought to be done and that's what they did because they thought he was a heretic for warning people to have it in their language. What they were trying to do is hold back error. Honestly, if you ask me, I'd love to restrain the prosperity gospel. Right?
It's heresy. The prosperity gospel is heresy and I'd love to restrain it but I'm not not going to do it by taking the scripture out of the hands. Right? So that's Wycliffe. Game changer.
1455, the Gutenberg Printing Press. Mass media is now possible. Wycliffe had to have it written out. He himself or somebody had to write it out. He or Pervey or somebody else, they had people that were willing to go against the law that would write this stuff down, but in 1455, it changes the game.
Gutenberg printing press means we can print the Bible now and the first book that was printed was the Bible in Latin that was sanctioned by the church. There's no problem with it whatsoever because it is the Latin Vulgate and that's the official book. 1516, so 1455, the Gutenberg printing press comes out, it goes and distributes the Bible in Latin, everybody's on the same page and that's not a bad thing. It was Jerome's translation which does have errors. Nobody nobody questions whether there were errors in Jerome's translation.
But in 1516, there's a guy named Desiderius Erasmus. Desiderius Erasmus is right there, a picture by Hans Holbein the younger. This is in the Louvre. We saw this actually last year. You will hardly ever see a picture of Erasmus where his nose is not in the book and he's writing because that's what he did.
His motto along with a lot of the Renaissance humanists, don't take that as a bad thing. The Renaissance humanists believed, we need to go back to the original sources. Ad fontes, to the source. Go back to the source. So he undertook to make a translation of the New Testament, but he wanted it in Greek just like we had it in Latin and everybody can look at it at the same time and know that they're seeing the same thing because it's copied from the press.
He wanted to do it in Greek so that we all would be starting from the same place. He had in his possession at the time, he had access to good copies of old manuscripts. They were available to him and he used them to make a translation into Greek. Now, that wasn't a problem because very few people understood Greek. It wasn't a problem for the Catholic church necessarily because he was going back to Adventist, to the sources.
We have these documents, sure, you can compile them. He did. Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic, he made the translation that Martin Luther would eventually use to make his German Bible and William Tyndale would use as the basis for his English Bible. So that 1516 allowed for Tyndale to start making a Bible that was based on the Greek and Hebrew, same one that had been used for Jerome when he made his Vulgate, but it was not two steps of translation anymore. It would be one step from Greek to English.
This guy is amazing. From the Greek, Tyndale makes his into Middle English, not Old English like Wycliffe, but it was Middle English from the Greek and now Tyndale, like I said, is amazing. Now, I'll talk about Tyndale. He was absolutely fluent in eight languages. He was passable in others.
Several dead languages. He had learned Greek and Hebrew from the cradle. He knew it and took to it and understood very very well what was going on. He recognized some discrepancies between the Greek text and the Vulgate text. He saw that it led to some great problems.
Now, was a good man, he was humble before God, he did not want for his opinion to be what it is. He wanted to have rightly translate God's word. That's what he wanted. He felt like that was the best thing going. Now, we've seen in the history in in all history, we tend confirmation bias.
Right? We all tend to look at things that agree with us and give them great standing and then things that disagree with us, we don't. But humility before the text being the linguist that he was, recognized that God's word is so good and people need to understand it in their own language instead of having translated and translated again with some other bias. So again, the humility of Wycliffe to say, Pervy, keep on working. As greater scholarship allows, I want you to refine this and make it as close as we can get it to what God has said.
I'd never want to see it go beyond the bounds for anybody's benefit. Exhorting instantly, Tyndale says, and beseeching those who are better seen in tongues than I. In the spirit of meekness and humility, please amend it, so is their duty to do so. If greater scholarship will allow, then make a better translation is what Tyndale says. By the way, 83% of the King James is exactly what Tyndale wrote.
83%. So that's a lot. 1528. So after the 1526 New Testament, he writes a treatise or a tract. It's only about 40 pages long.
It's available online. There's a PDF of it and it's on the obedience of a Christian man. At this time, Henry the eighth is the king of England. Henry the eighth has an issue. He has issues, actually.
He has an issue. He has asked from Rome. He's asked the pope to give him a special dispensation or a cardinal Woolsey, actually. Asked the cardinal to give him a special dispensation to be able to marry Catherine of Aragorn, who was a close relative's wife previously. This should not have happened.
It's not something the church believes should have happened, but the king asked for a special dispensation and the cardinal gave him that, which he should not have according to the rules. James knew it when he asked for it. But Tyndale's obedience of a Christian man had in it, it said that we are subject to God. We're not subject to the ones that are above us as far as church clergy, whatever sort of thing and he became under a situation of conscience, a crisis of faith because he and Catherine of Aragorn, Catholic family, Catherine of Aragorn. King James was a very good Catholic, no problems except he really wanted to marry this woman, so he asked for a special dispensation.
They give it to him and they have miscarriage after miscarriage after miscarriage. They had a couple of daughters but they didn't have any sons. He couldn't pass along his lineage through his son and it was really bothersome. So the real crisis of conscience that he had was that he had asked for that dispensation. It was against God's law and what he was experiencing was the punishment.
So everybody presents this as he wanted to marry Anne Boleyn, true. And he wanted to get rid of Catherine, true. He started church on his own, kinda true. But what led to that was the priesthood of the believer, obedience to the Christian man. When he read that, actually, Anne Boleyn gave it to him.
When he read that, he started to believe that this never should have happened. He wanted the marriage annulled and they wouldn't do that. Now, Tyndale would later write, yeah, you can't do that. This is what you got. Go ahead with what you've got.
But that preceded 1528, preceded the 1534 act of supremacy. In the act of supremacy, the king of England, the Privy Council all decided that no one in England had any authority that was higher than the king. If you had anyone that you thought was higher than the king, you could not appeal to them, you had to appeal to the king which meant every Catholic priest, cardinal, bishop, everybody all the way down the line that appealed to the pope was violating the act of supremacy. So, Catholic left in droves, the early church of England, Anglican church, Episcopal church got started around this time under Henry the eighth, fifteen thirty four, active supremacy. You cannot appeal to anyone outside of the king.
He's the final. And so the king says Coverdale, Miles Coverdale, had been one of Tyndale's assistants. He said, hey, you ought to get us together a Bible that we can all agree on. And so the assistant finished the whole Bible including Apocrypha and he put it together at the end of the old testament which was a new thing to put it all together. These are the books that are not canonical but they're kind of helpful in the intertestamental silence.
And every book, if you pick up a Catholic Bible today, they still don't think they're canonical but they're in the same place. They're in the middle between Old and New Testament. Tyndale is amazing. What were his last words? So William Tyndale's crime was that he translated the Bible into English.
That was his issue. That was what it was. And so before it was legal, he went out of the country. It was in Antwerp and then it was okay in Antwerp to do what he was doing. Since he had been for the king in one way and against him in another way, people say, did Henry VIII really like him, not like him, whatever.
He did try to free him. A page out of Fox's book from the Martyrs depicts Tyndale's execution and this is it. They tie him to a stake where they were going to burn him at the stake, but they ended up he ended up strangling before he was burned. But the last words that Tyndale said were, hope the king of England's eyes. Open his eyes to actually see what it is that you've said.
Now, that was Henry the eighth and he started the Anglican church which was a separation from mother church. That's a schism. That's not something we're looking for. We really want unity, but it was a breaking away from the Vulgate. And then the king asked for Tyndale's guy, Coverdale to start.
So, he's burned at the stake by the authorities in Antwerp, actually. It was even after the act of supremacy and Henry the eighth sent Thomas Kramer to try to try to get him free and it didn't work. 1537, immediately after that was called Matthew's Bible, John Rogers version was mostly Tyndale with a few changes which is fine because they were really looking for but it's almost all Tyndale which is that's fine and good. It's a good translation but they started to put notes in the margins. The notes in the margins of your Bible are not inspired.
Okay? The this was kind of the first life application Bible where he started to write the extra stuff in the sides and one of his marginal notes for first Peter three seven after all. First Peter three seven says, that to deal with your wife as the weaker vessel, treat her gently and kindly and so that your prayers may not be hindered. Is there anything in there about beating your wife? No.
There's nothing even close to that, but the marginal notes, this became known as the wife beater's Bible. That's not great for sales. No, I'm not joking about that. It was terrible, but the marginal notes in there are a problem and so 1537, we got to get rid of that. We got to get on the same page really.
And so, in 1539, the first authorized version by the king of England was the great Bible and the great Bible might sound like to us, oh, that's great. Well, it was great because of the they were huge. So it was 11 and a half inches wide or more than that as far as the cover, but 11 by 16 and a half. It's tabloid sized piece of paper, huge Bibles with huge thick covers. They had to be chained because they were great.
Great Bibles. They're really really good, great translation work, and they would stand for a while. People stole them from the churches. There was a hunger for God's word and they had to be chained to the pulpit. So, they chained these Bibles to the pulpits so people wouldn't steal them and so sometimes you'll hear this one called the chained Bible.
So, this was the first authorized version from the king of England. Way fifteen sixty, the Geneva Bible. Now, I know some of y'all actually in the first service, I'm sure, but in this there there might be one or two of you that have the Geneva Bible. If you're reformed tradition, whether Presbyterian or reformed Baptist, this might be one that you wanna I want that one because it was written under the direction of John Calvin. It was way Calvinistic.
Sovereignty of God played very very heavily in it. This was the one that had marginal notes. Again, marginal notes I think are a problem. That's just me. If they help you understand what it actually says, that's good, but be careful.
So the marginal notes had a definite reform stance. I'm not against that. I'm just telling you that when you start adding to it, it's tough. This was the Bible that the puritans and the Mayflower pilgrims used. Fifteen sixty Geneva Bible, very very popular among the puritans.
In the preface and in the to the reader portions of the King James which came out 1611, some forty, fifty one years later, it's when it quotes the Bible, it quotes the Geneva Bible which is funny because the Puritans were let's get to this. So 1560, super Calvinistic. When I said that history is a plumb line of theology. The sovereignty of God and the responsibility of man. Right?
So there's that. The Geneva Bible is very heavily on the sovereignty of God and on not having a hierarchical structure above you. So that's hard when there are bishops who are above you. So the 1560 Geneva Bible produced the bishop's Bible which was very much whenever the word congregation came up in Geneva, which is those who are called ecclesia, the ones who are called out from all tribes and nations into the family of God. Whenever it said congregation, the bishop's Bible says church because they wanted a high church, they wanted to have the authority, and so the bishop's Bible was probably the poorest translation of the day and that's not just because I'm protestant.
Most people agree that's not a great translation, but it was heavily favoring the king, it was heavily favoring the hierarchy, was heavily favoring that. So, in 1568, people started crying out. The Puritans there were Puritans who were in the pulpits already and they really couldn't stand that. They used the Geneva Bible. So, in the Elizabethan area, Elizabeth, the virgin queen, the one who never took husband, never wanted to divide power.
It was a great time in England, Elizabethan era and she actually is on one of the frontispiece pages of the bishop's Bible. And if you see to her right, there is faith and to her left, there is charity and she represents hope. The hope you find is in a sovereign. So, not a great translation. It was a second authorized version in the Elizabethan area.
The Catholic church, like I said, the Catholic church of four zero five of twelve twenty nine, twelve thirty four is not the same as today. It wasn't the same as 1582. The New Testament was a Catholic English language New Testament. It was based on the Latin Vulgate. That's still the official document of the Catholic church and so, they did translate it into English from the Latin and it was sanctioned and you could read the you could read it in your own language.
They have never relented from that even though up until 1962, most masses were in Latin. Okay? You could read it in your own language and that's not a problem. And today, it's really not a problem. The Catholic church is pushing people into Bible study regularly like I said.
This is the closest we've been in five hundred years. Don't mess it up. Old Testament and Apocrypha would be completed in sixteen o nine and 1610 and that is immediately before the release of the King James Bible but the King James was started because King James the sixth of Scotland. Okay, King James the first of England and King James the sixth are the same person. King James the sixth of Scotland, his mother is Catholic, Queen of Scots, Mary Queen of Scots.
She's Catholic and John Knox and other Presbyterians were vehemently against her. It was a tumultuous time in Scotland when he exceeded to the throne when he was one year old. He heard of what killed his mom basically, and this Presbyterian thought of individualistic freedom in religion and priesthood of the believer and Calvinism and all the other stuff. He was raised by Puritans and Presbyterians though his mom was Catholic. He was brought up to be a king and he was very well educated.
He handled Greek very well himself. He handled Hebrew very well himself. He handled Latin very well himself. And he was the king in sixteen o three. He just come to the throne in April of sixteen o three, he was met with a petition, the millinery petition.
There were a thousand signatures on this petition, subscribers, people who signed on the bottom bottom line. Supposedly, a thousand signatories, that was about a a tenth of the clergyman in England believed kind of puritan thought. And so, they appealed to the king to get rid of the bishop's Bible, basically. It's not true. It's not a good translation and so they gave a lot of reasons why and then a thousand of them signed off and so it was a puritan call for reform in the church of England.
With active supremacy, the king is the guy that's on top. He's the one that makes the decisions and so, if he calls for a translation of the Bible, then he'll get it. And so, he calls together the Hampton Court Conference where he calls together the groups that are interested. Now, the bishops obviously are interested and the puritans are obviously interested, but there are people all along the spectrum in there and he didn't even now the petition was given to him by the puritans who were in the pulpit, thousand of them. He didn't even let them in the room till the second day.
He talked to the bishops and he talked to the other guys. Now, James was really smart and he believed in unity. He could not stand the war that he had seen in Scotland his whole life. War depletes resources. He saw that Scotland was absolutely broke.
When he became the king of England and it unifies those two countries, he goes from there and says, we are not gonna fight over this. We are going to gather together the best that we have and when the bishop said, but he's doing this and that's cutting undercutting your power and ours and he was saying, but what the Bible says is this. What the Bible says does it not say? This. And so he would play the puritan because he was smart and he wouldn't be kept on one side or the other.
He believed in unity. He would pull people from both sides. By resolution, the king, James Stuart, first of England, sixth of Scotland, ordered rules to be drawn up for a new translation of the Bible and he and Richard Bancroft, who was archbishop of Canterbury, set the 15 rules. He distributed them. They chose people, six companies.
Oh, yeah. This is this is great. Ray will now attempt not to bore you with the rules like he's been doing this whole time. Only the funnier importance will be mentioned. The crux of the rules was this, this will be a scholarly undertaking.
In humility, we'll look at what the Greek and the Hebrew says and we will do the best we can to be as accurate as we can because we're shooting for a Bible we can agree on. We're not going to sway it to one side or to the other. We're going to say, thus saith the Lord. So partisanship takes a backseat to true scholarship. They were a bit slanted in one way.
He said, you can pay attention to all of the Bibles that I have listed so far except leave the Geneva Bible out of this. All it does is cause trouble. It's super Calvinistic and everybody knows it and he says, I don't want any of that Presbyterian nonsense creeping in. Now, mentioned that the to the reader portion is all in the Geneva Bible. They didn't pay any attention to him.
They paid attention to everything, brought it together, suggestions were made, like I said, for the earlier versions. They left the Geneva out, but everybody paid attention to it anyway, which could have been trouble because he's the king. Right? From sixteen o four to sixteen eleven, they labored. There were six companies of scholars.
There were nine men per company, 48 translators with a capital t and one administrator for each of them. Now, they worked on it individually at first. So they spread out these guys and said, this is the section that you're going to do, gospels. Right? Acts and Revelation or whatever.
They're going to get them in each company. They split the Bible up into six pieces. Individually, they all had to work on it and then, you remember in class when you have to hand off your paper for your neighbor to check it. Right? That's what they did.
They translated their section, handed it off to their neighbor and they did that six times per company And then they passed along that to the next company. So it was a lot. And they did that and it took them seven years, almost eight years to do it. But they got out of that a very good translation because they considered people. Now, I will say that King James wanted the lunatic fringe from both sides not to be in the room.
He did not want the crazies from both sides. He wanted the people who believed in the authority of the word of God and in humility bend themselves to the word of God and not the other way around. Consensus was important. More important than that was fidelity to the original Greek, Aramaic, and Hebrew text. So King James released in 1611.
It's funny that it got mixed reviews. To me, that's funny. In fact, one of the critics we have, Hugh Broughton was his name. He's a Hebrew scholar and he said, I would rather be rent to pieces by wild horses than have had any part in the urging of such a wretched version of the Bible on the poor people. But they didn't ask him to translate it and most people think that's why he had that opinion.
I say that because this was the version that was authorized for three hundred and fifty years. We don't see anything else come out. Now, the Puritans still, some of them still, did use the Geneva version from their pulpits. They still did. And that wasn't officially okay, but it was a matter of conscience.
And that was something that kind of got started at this time too. That as a matter of conscience, you could present it from the even from the pulpits of the Church of England. So the King James is known as the authorized version. It's really the third that was authorized, but it's the best of the three, and it remained the standard text in the English speaking world for the almost three hundred and fifty for more than three hundred and fifty years. Some of y'all a lot of y'all still have it.
That's the Bible that I grew up on until I was 14. I got this one, which is the New King James Version. Just remove the these and thous for the yous and y'alls, but The translator's note to the reader of the sixteen eleven. The reason I originally started studying this in seminary was because I had a King James only friend that would just die on that hill. He sent me book after book after book about how great the King James was and I did an earnest study to see what what's going on here.
The position of the Church of England as opposed to the Church of Rome as it pertains to scriptural availability. They wanted for people to be able to understand what the Bible said. It's also says that we did the best we could but if anybody should come along after us that understands and it has a scholarly reason, it this is not the end of the work. This is a noble effort. It is a very good translation.
In 1885, I go into tiny little bit next week, three minutes next week. But in 1885, the English revised version was to adapt the King James version to the present state of English language. A lot changed between middle English and eighteen eighty five's English. And so what they were doing was without changing the poetry of it or the idiom of it, they wanted to change a little bit of the vocabulary to make it more present. Like the word conversation now is a conversation talking between two people, but conversation didn't mean that in the 1611.
These are the guys that helped revise in 1881 and came out in 1885. In nineteen o one, American Standard Version, basically the same but it was not in England, it was in America. And the only real difference is in the places where Yahweh, w h y h, the Tetragrammaton is used. Almost all Bibles say, the Lord. This one said, Jehovah.
That's the difference. So it's not like it's changed. It's just the name of God. 1971, New American Standard Bible. I was born in 1971.
It was a big time for Bible translation. This Bible and the living Bible both came out in '71. The New American Standard Bible sought to be absolutely faithful to the text including keeping the conjunctions that connect thoughts at the front of the sentence, which nobody speaks that way in English. That's that's not the way we talk in English. But King James did the same thing because it matters.
How they connect to one another, the conjunctions make all the difference. And so, it's easier to understand the flow. And the reason I use this one on Sunday morning is because I'm very interested in the grammar of the original text, and I want to present it to you as faithfully as I can to what the Greek says. Right? So that's new new American Standard.
That's a great one. It's the one I use on Sunday mornings, although throughout my life, the New King James is what I've used. The Living Bible came out in '71 also. Now, New American Standard is absolute fidelity to the text including keeping the conjunctions in the same place, and the living Bible is a paraphrase. Admittedly so, it is a paraphrase.
This one, I'm sure you all have seen it since 1971. It's very popular paraphrase, the green one with a little gold embossing on the front. I know a dear friend who read the Bible all the way through in the living Bible when she when when they were in the fifth grade and upon reading the Bible alone connected with Jesus. It wasn't because somebody else led her to that conclusion, but that was the way God used a humble heart in front of his word. So it's a paraphrase.
Where is it? There it is. Living Bible is a paraphrase, but it still carries God's word if you're humble before the text. New international version comes out as a whole Bible in '78. This was a committee that was an international committee that was hoping to get the Bible translated for all of the languages in the world.
That's why it's an international version, although it's in individual languages. New King James, like I said, I was given one of those when I was 13 or 14 for my birthday. And I like that one because it still sounds like the Bible to me. I still if I'm preaching a funeral or I'm preaching a wedding, often I'll pull from the New King James because it's elevated language and I love it. If I'm preaching grammar, I'd go from the New American Standard.
1996, so 71 is the living Bible. In 1996, it came out with the New Living Translation and it says NLT translation because it is a translation. It uses a dynamic equivalent rather than word for word. It's a good one. My Greek professor, William Larkin, was the guy who did Acts for the New Living Translation.
And so, of course, he had people checking him, Darryl Bach from Dallas Theological and a bunch of people. They took the same method that King James had used as far as they wanted to get as close as they can, but it was a dynamic equivalent, very readable. But it to me, it just it's it's paragraph form and it doesn't sound like my memory verses don't pop out. That's fine. 2,001 English Standard Version.
For fear of having had things go off to the theologically liberal side, this was an idea. There were theological conservatives that we need to swing that back. So we're talking about small swings these now in these days because all of the information is available to all of us all the time. On the Internet, we have this, but these versions are hard copy versions. This one has made a a stance between egalitarian and complementarian.
This is unabashedly a complementarian Bible. English standard version. It's great. Good translation. Nope.
I don't have a problem with it. But it says in the front, the to the reader portions that tells you why they did what they did and it helps. When you're having trouble Oh, 2002. 2002 is the message of a couple of copies of the message and I mentioned it a few weeks ago, Eugene Peterson by himself wrote the message and he's a pastor. He'd been preaching for years.
He'd been pastoring for years and he saw that people were having trouble getting it in there through their through their heads and through grammar and everything else. So he wanted to go overarching message, what is this about? Paragraph for paragraph and it has some shortfalls, but it's a good good good paraphrase of the Bible. It is the message. He never claimed for it to be
a
translation. If you ever get stuck and you feel like I'm not just getting this, you can grab a living Bible or living new living translation or the message and it might get you unstuck. Humility before the text, if you admit, I don't know what this means. Go to one that you can understand. My whole point of this whole message is you can trust the version that you have most likely.
I I know most of you and I know most of you use. There are some bad translations out there but there are not many and God can use all of them if you'll be humble before the text. 2,017 is the Holman Christian Standard Bible came out, the Southern Baptist came out with it and then they dropped the Holman. Holman was the publisher and that's Christian Standard Bible is from 2017. That's the most recent one.
That's been the one that came out while
I was
here. It's good to me. I I haven't started using it but I have one, you know. This is what I want to end on. It's the longest sermon I've ever preached.
I apologize to the visitors ahead of them. Here we are at scripture. My whole point by saying all of that is if you have an agenda when you go in, the agenda should be fidelity to God's word because that humility before God's word is what transforms lives. Christ transforms. He did it with his disciples by telling them everything in Moses and the prophets and explaining how it related to him and that's what the Bible does.
If we will humble ourselves and go straight to the source, it'll work for just as the rain and the snow come down from heaven. Can I get a witness? We've been doing this for a long time. Snow, snow, snow, snow, There's still snow out here and rain. We've seen it for the past few days.
Have you noticed how green the grass is getting? The snow's not even melted off and around the edges, the grass is already getting green. Just as the rain and the snow come down from heaven and they do not return in that cycle without watering the earth and nourishing it and making the earth produce and sprout and providing seed to the sower and bread to the eater, that's what God does with rain and snow. Just like that. So, in this way, just like that will my word be which goes out of my mouth.
His word is good and it is pure and it carries his heart and it carries his redemptive power. That's the word that goes out of my mouth and it's not going to return to me empty but it will accomplish exactly what I desire. And without it it it'll without accomplishing what I desire and without succeeding in the purpose for which I sent it. God is able to protect his word and he's done it. Now, the sovereignty of God, he's able.
He's also given us responsibility and we need to be honest. If we're translating scripture and there's one reading that says, this should convict your heart, Ray. This is where you're off. I should allow that conviction to drive me to the foot of the cross. Get it under the blood and go forward with what God has for me.
Agreeing with him about my own shortfall and sin. Instead of saying, uh-uh, I think it means this and changing it. Either the Bible is gonna bend me, which is what I want, or I'm gonna bend it, which God forbid that I ever do that. I don't wanna do that. So my word will be which goes out of my mouth.
It's not gonna return void or empty, but it's gonna accomplish what I desire. God Almighty said that. Would you stand with me? We're gonna sing, whatever comes up on that wall. Take my life.
Lead me lord. That's a good one. Perfect. Thank you for hanging with me.
Take my life, lead me Lord. Take my life, lead me Lord. Make my life useful to thee. Take my life. Lead me, Lord.
Take my life. Lead me, Lord. Make my life useful to thee. Take my life, teach me Lord. Take my life, teach me Lord.
Make my life useful to thee. Take my life, teach me, Lord. Take my life, teach me, Lord. Make my life useful to thee. Here am I.
Send me, Lord. Here am I. Send me, Lord. Make my life useful to thee. Here am I.
Send me, Lord. Here am I. Send me, Lord. Make my life useful to thee.
Amen. Lord God Almighty, I pray a blessing on these who have assembled in your name to gain insight and wisdom into who you are and how you function, how you work. Lord, would you take your scripture and plant it deep in our hearts and give us the confidence of knowing that it will accomplish what you desire as we humble ourselves before you. Lord, would you take our life and make it useful to thee. In Jesus name, amen.
Amen.
Topics
Bible Translation HistoryBible VersionsEnglish BibleJohn WycliffeKing James BibleWilliam Tyndale
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